Despite the infinite compute power of the cloud and all the machine learning and artificial intelligence that thrives on that compute power, technology just falls short of our expectations. Which is exactly what happened when one developer gave Microsoft's Bing Speech Recognition API a whirl.

Maxime Locqueville of Algolia is often asked what tool the company uses for API documentation. He gives the name but he’s tempted to say it’s not an important question. What matters more than the software rendering your docs is the quality of the content.

​Facebook’s baby GraphQL is the hot new thing in APIs promising to topple REST from its perch. But how does a newbie go about using it and what for? And why might you not want to use it? David Iffland over at InfoQ sat down with Steve Faulkner to talk about how they adopted GraphQL and why.

​Just like airport security, a system hosting a public API has to deal with heavy loads of incoming traffic every day. Most of that traffic is legitimate but not always. David Andrzejek explains to you how you can keep the bad apples out of your API while still serving millions of requests each day.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an AI-powered voice chat interface in the browser. You’ll use the Web Speech API to listen to the user’s voice and reply with a synthetic voice. Tomomi Imura over at Smashing Magazine takes you thru every step so you can go from zero to hero in no time.

Visualizations are a useful component of web applications because you can display data, build mental images, and engage your audience. Tableau, the business intelligence and analytics company, explained in this tutorial how to track a storm by consuming their JavaScript SDK.

​It’s no secret that the API business is big business. Over $500m was pumped into API-driven firms just last year and that number is only likely to rise. But how do companies make money from an API and how should you price API usage to get the best return?

AWS and other cloud computing giants have been enjoying bumper profits in recent years, which means startups must be spending more on cloud computing. Cloud costs can jump if you don’t keep an eye on your budget. Casey Benko recommends investing in cloud cost analysis tools to keep costs down.

Handling API calls in the cloud with a service like AWS Lambda is one of the latest ways enterprises try to save on resources. In theory, you can save a ton of money. But be careful. Costs for API calls can mount up, sometimes leaving you with a cloud computing bill ten times the size you expected.

Software development has moved quickly in only a decade. From deploying to physical servers, to virtualization, and IaaS to PaaS. The latest development, however, is the Micro API, which builds on serverless computing and FaaS to take API development to the next level.

​Lego is not the first thing product owners would think of when looking for a model onboarding process. But they should. At least that is Cristiano Betta’s theory over at his blog, who will tell you the lessons you can learn for your API from the Lego onboarding experience.

From Slack integrations to coffee buttons, if Starbucks were to open up their API to the public, there are a ton of integrations that third-party developers could create. Tendigi CTO Nick Lee over at the Tendigi blog couldn’t wait so he reverse-engineered the Starbucks mobile app.

​AWS is running scared of Kubernetes as it becomes the industry standard for managing containers. Why? The open-source platform gives companies a way to run apps across different clouds not just on AWS. Matt Asay over at Tech Republic provides the details.

Consumers are interacting with retailers through an ever increasing range of channels. New channels are emerging all the time and a retailer that wants to stay ahead of the game needs to adopt an API-ready approach to make integrating those new touchpoints quick and painless.

​In order to develop a REST API in PHP quickly and easily it might be a good idea to use a lightweight PHP framework. Developing your own from scratch with plain PHP, apart from being a pain and taking too much time, is likely to require a lot of testing and deviate from REST standards.

REST APIs use URIs to address resources. While they’re known as opaque identifiers, there are better and worse ways to write URIs. Guy Levin over at RestCase has formulated a set of design rules for API URIs that you should keep in mind to make things easy for your API clients.

Working with numerous third party APIs can be a headache. Damon Swayn of InSite should know. The InSite team has integrated countless APIs for its clients’ CRMs into its platform. Damon over at his Medium blog gives you the top four lessons he and his team have learned.

We keep hearing about alternative uses for blockchain tech beyond that of a currency replacement. But real-world implementations that prove such horizontal applicability are few and far between. Looking to plug a loophole in the short-selling of stocks, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has launched t0.

APIs sometimes go through changes that are so big they require a new version to make sure API users don’t break their apps. Versioning APIs is, however, difficult and some teams go out of their way to avoid it. Google can’t do that and so they’ve developed some consistent rules for versioning APIs.

Limiting API usage is a standard technique to avoid overloading your server or database at critical times. It’s not always so easy to manage without annoying API clients. Ben Weintraub over at the New Relic blog explains the techniques the analytics company developed to limit resource usage.